Network-based services exist that allow customers to purchase and utilize instances of computing resources (“instances”), such as virtual machine instances, on a permanent or as-needed basis. In addition to virtual machine instances, these services typically allow customers to purchase and utilize instances of other types of computing resources for use with virtual machine instances. For example, customers might be permitted to purchase and utilize instances of data storage resources, instances of database resources, instances of networking resources, and instances of other types of resources. Utilizing instances of these various types, customers of such a service can create custom “solutions” that provide various types of functionality, such as application hosting, backup and storage, content delivery, World Wide Web (“Web”) hosting, enterprise information technology (“IT”) solutions, database services, and others.
It is not unusual for network-based services such as those described above to periodically experience hardware, software, or other types of system failures that result in the failure or unavailability of customer-operated instances. In typical network-based services, customers are not made aware of such failures until after a failure has occurred and the customer-operated instances have been negatively impacted in some way. This can be very frustrating to customers of such network-based services.
The disclosure made herein is presented with respect to these and other considerations.